MADRID, 4 Ago. (EUROPA PRESS) –
LaLiga and Movistar Plus+ have won the joint lawsuit they filed before the Commercial Court No. 9 of Barcelona that
enables weekly blocking of access to domains that facilitate the piracy of LaLiga content.
As reported by the two parties in a statement this Thursday, the judgment of July 25 indicates that this protection measure is necessary since “numerous cases of digital piracy that flagrantly affect the exploitation of their rights” are detected, through the use of “different models of piracy of audiovisual content on the Internet (especially sports content)”.
The judicially authorized measure is called ‘dynamic blocking’ since it will not be applied in a timely manner, but weekly with the new identifications of URLs, domains and IP addresses, without the need to notify the court in advance.
This sentence will be in force until the 2024/2025 season and will begin its operations from the week of August 8, before the start of LaLiga Santander on the 12th. LaLiga pointed out that this judicial mandate is in line with those of February 11, 2020 , of the Mercantile Court number 7 of Madrid, and of December 21, 2021, of the
Commercial Court number 6 of Barcelona, which enabled a similar protection mechanism.
“In this way, progress is made in the consolidation of a jurisprudence that
reinforces the legal tools to combat piracy with respect to the sustainability of the exploitation of LaLiga content”, celebrated the employer’s association.
On the other hand, LaLiga also reported that Movistar Plus+ has won another ruling in line with the previous one so that Internet access telecommunications operators in Spain have to block
weekly access to domains that facilitate the piracy of audiovisual content on the platform.
For the titular Magistrate of the Mercantile Court number 6 of Barcelona, the purpose is “to obtain the blocking of those web pages through which the rights of
intellectual property”.
In the verdict of the sentence, which is valid for three
sports seasons, it is also indicated that the blocking must be carried out within a maximum period of three hours from the notification of the new list that it is not necessary to present via court.
In this way, all the contents of the Movistar Plus+ platform, including the sports content of its Movistar LaLiga, Movistar UEFA Champions and UEFA Europa League, #0 or ‘#Vamos’ channels, will be protected through the weekly pirate domain blocking mechanism enabled judicially, and, in addition, the contents of those OTTs with which it has agreements (DAZN, Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, ATRESplayer Premium, Mitele, LaLiga Sports).
This judgment is in line with a previous one, of February 11, 2020, of the Mercantile Court number 7 of Madrid, which
enabled a similar protection mechanism, so that “jurisprudence that strengthens the legal tools to combat piracy is also consolidated.”
LaLiga stressed that, according to the data collected by the Observatory of piracy and digital content consumption habits 2020, prepared by the independent consultancy ‘GfK’, that year there were 5,239 million illegal accesses to content worth 30,892 million euros, with
a loss to the sector of 2,416 million.